Is this the moment of opportunity for the EU?
Integration follows from an emergency, but it is wrong to think that just any crisis produces a new moment of integration. There have been plenty of challenges and crises to Europe over the past twelve years: they come thick and fast. European federalists first hoped that the Euro crisis would work that way; but debt meant a larger divide between northern Europe and a southern European periphery. Then Putin and the attack on Crimea and eastern Ukraine? But Russia skillfully drew more and more members of the EU into its orbit. Then Brexit, or Trump? But by that time the refugee crisis had prompted new lines of division, between eastern and western Europe.So far the key historical conditions for a bold move to end Europe’s attachment to the nation-state have been missing. Why should covid-19 do what Putin, Trump, Brexit and debt could not do? There are two reasons: one is concerned [with] the world, the other with political competence and effectiveness.
[…] Neither Merkel nor Macron is really good at doing political emotion, but both – and especially Merkel – pride themselves on being skillful managers, who make evidence-based decisions. The covid crisis demonstrates terrifyingly that the nation state cannot do many things. Many effective interventions have to be local, and not national; but many others depend on the international provision of public goods.
Covalization: Europe on the Rack Between Globalization and Covid – A Historian’s Perspective on the European Union
By: Harold James – Princeton University
What do EU citizens want
The European Council on Foreign Relations commissioned a poll of over 11,000 citizens in nine countries across Europe – Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden – in order to understand how the pandemic has affected European citizens’ views on politics, society, and Europe’s place in the world. The results seem paradoxical:
[T]he European project should be rethought not as an integration process based on ideals, but as one based on fate. Shared geography dictates common action even more than shared values. In this context, what we are witnessing is more a ‘Milward moment’ than a ‘Hamilton moment’; less a radical step towards federalisation, and more a burgeoning consensus on the need to use Brussels as a tool to empower the nation state.
Europe’s pandemic politics: How the virus has changed the public’s worldview
By: Ivan Krastev, Mark Leonard – European Council on Foreign Relations
